Tides | Bertha Aguilar G

Reprise for Los Angeles 1. Tides is an experimental

documentary that explores a hidden geography of Los Angeles

through the sites in which three foreign and politically

committed artists, the Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein,

the Mexican painter David Alfaro Siqueiros and the Filipino

writer Carlos Bulosan, worked and lived during the decade

of the 1930's.

When I moved to Los Angeles, California, the city I had

imagined confronted the cityscape I was now immersed in.

I realized that the city thrives in ethnic and cultural

diversity constantly overlooked in its normative histories.

To counter this phenomenon, the people left behind have

become the keepers and producers of their own histories,

histories that for a long time have been thought of as nonessential

in understanding contemporary Los Angeles.

However, these histories remain known mostly by the

ethnicities that produce them. Far away from Mexico, how

could I, as a foreigner, claim a place for myself?

Tides could be understood as a map that pinpoints the sites

where the artists lived, produced, and showed their art.

The lives and works I gathered in this documentary compose

a diverse and fragmented panorama about social struggle and

art in Los Angeles. Taking into account the scope chosen, I

do not intend depth but some amplitude, in an attempt to

break with the historical lineages imposed to these

particular histories. My desire is to contribute to an

expanded cultural geography of the city.